Susan Elliott is the author of the chapbook The Singing is My Favorite Part (Etched Press, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in the Best American Poetry blog, Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and Broad River Review, among others. Susan received her PhD in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Southern Mississippi, where she won the Joan Johnson Award for Poetry in 2014.

Sarah Lao is a sophomore at the Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Georgia. She currently edits for Evolutions Magazine and reads for Polyphony Lit, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sooth Swarm Journal, Eunoia Review, and the Inflectionist Review.

wood and old glue.Katarina Boudreaux is a New Orleans author, musician, dancer, and teacher. Her first novel “Platform Dwellers” is available from Owl Hollow Press. She has two collections of poetry -- “Alexithymia” from Finishing Line Press and “Anatomy Lessons” from Flutter Press.

Holly Magill’s poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including The
Interpreter’s House and Bare Fiction, and anthologies –Stairs and Whispers:
D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press) and #MeToo: A Women’s Poetry Anthology (Fair Acre Press).
She co-edits Atrium –www.atriumpoetry.com. Her debut
pamphlet, The Becoming of Lady Flambé,
is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing:http://www.indigodreams.co.uk/holly-magill/4594330527

Winner of the 2015 Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition, he has been
runner-up or shortlisted in Listowel, Cuirt, Patrick Kavanagh, Interpreter’s
House and Cork Literary Review. A poet of international breadth, he has had
poems published in the UK, US, India, Romania, Australia and Mexico, and has also
been a featured poet at the Berryman Conference in Minneapolis and the Poets in
Transylvania Festival. He is the curator of the Irish
Centre for Poetry Studies site, a founder member of the Hibernian Writers’
Group and has just published his debut poetry collection, ‘Growing Up in
Colour’, with Doire Press.

Sharon is retired and lives on the Isle of Portland, in Dorset. Recent publication credits include Ink, Sweat and Tears, Algebra of Owls, The High Window and Snakeskin; poems are forthcoming in Eye Flash and Bonnie’s Crew.

Jack Warren is a British poet and long distance walker from Somerset. His
work has appeared in Corrugated Wave, The Anomaly Literary Journal and
he was recently selected as one of the 'Fifty Best New British and Irish
Poets 2018' by Eyewear Publishing. In
2015 he completed a 224 mile hike following the River Severn from sea
to source and in 2017 he completed sections of the 1056 mile Via
Francigena Pilgrim route from Rome to London. He currently lives in
Moscow.

Old Rocker

Melancholy swirls around himrising like blue smoke.God he’s ancient I think. Time to go to bed.

I turn off the telly, head upstairs, glance in the mirror,grimace when I see

a strange old womanglaring back at me.

Susan Castillo Street has published three collections of poems, The Candlewoman's Trade(2003), Abiding Chemistry, (2015), The Gun-Runner’s Daughter (2018) and a pamphlet, Constellations(2016). Her poetry has appeared in Southern Quarterly,Prole, The High Window, Ink Sweat & Tears, Messages in a Bottle, The Missing Slate, Clear Poetry, Prole,Three Drops from a Cauldron, Foliate Oak, The Lake, Algebra of Owls,The Yellow Chair Review, Poetry Shed,and other journals and anthologies. Her poem ‘Bird of God’ recently won first prize in the 2018 Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition.

Thursday, 20 December 2018

Of All The Things

larger than life in Memphis
twitching lip and hips, hound
dog in shades on a Harley

or me on a mountain
high enough to see Marvin
and a constellation of stars
called Stevie, Diana and Aretha

and me moonwalking
like Michael back to Neverland
at the news Prince is alive
again at Paisley Park

and of all the things

imagine the day John Lennon
died. Eleanor Rigby and all
the lonely people on Penny Lane
in the pouring rain

it’s easy if you try.

Paul Waring is a retired clinical psychologist who once designed menswear and was a singer/songwriter in Liverpool bands. He is a 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee whose poems have been published in Amaryllis, Prole, High Window, Atrium, Algebra of Owls, Domestic Cherry, Clear Poetry, Ofi Press, Marble Poetry, The Lampeter Review and others. https://waringwords.wordpress.com

Monday, 17 December 2018

News On Your Birthday While Respirator Instructs Lungs, April, 2008

I

Canadian Red Beetles Devour Forests

first green then grey then red the voice saidit’s insects that matter of factly exhibit cluesthe earth is softening, the seasons melting its edgesand there is no equation for which came firstjust that there are beetles making matchsticks from forestswithout time or fleshthere is no evolution no crisisonly this relentless crackling of branches this shell sheddingmethodical munching these red crawling tides

prices rise with the value of loosely bagged earthfall when false claims of false cheatingfloat gracefully above calloused palms and sweatminers night-pick cobalt while middlemen color houses with mineralsand mine bosses buy back what was carefully lifted a five dollar bill for an airplane, a dishwasher, porcelain a brilliant bluesediment hue dug from artistic trenches strange-tinged, thieving lands

IV

Father of LSD Dead at 102

medical memory’s problem childa stop-heart human guinea pigsight like a “warped mirror,” he saidwhile he was searching for fungusto cure some unnamed diseasea ”horror show” of displaced movement and time he said,self-discovery, enlightenment, drug sprees, window jumpingthough he mounted the mind lubricant defense:

“open your eyes”

Skye Anicca is the recipient of a Dana Award in short fiction and grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and from the Vermont Studio Center. Her writing has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Alligator Juniper, Puerto del Sol, and Passages North.

Thursday, 13 December 2018

ANNE BONNY TO DANIEL DEFOE

Now we are to begin a History full of surprizing Turns and Adventures; I mean, that of Mary Read and Anne Bonny; the odd Incidents of their rambling Lives are such, that some may be tempted to think the whole Story no better than a Novel or Romance…

I was pirate and woman and all,and I sailed with and slept with Jack Rackham,who, if he had fought like a man,need not have been hanged like a dog.

And still a warm glassful of grogor a lungful of salt air recalls thosefiery kisses from Jack and from Maryand the tang of hot blood on the deck.

We left many brave warships a wreck,many argosies spoiled of their cargo.We were pardoned by Governor Rogersbut returned to our old course the same.

Beyond law, beyond guilt, beyond shame,slipped free of the cables of duty,we sailed by the wind and the starlightand lived by the codes that we chose.

When the pirate-hunters, our foes,found us moored off the coast of Jamaica,the men fled below, drunk and fearful.Only Mary and I stayed to fight,

and our cutlasses gleamed and flashed bright,and our pistols roared out like the thunder.We fought, back to back, for our freedom,with our teeth and our nails and our knives.

I’m the only one now that survives.The Revenge’s crew went to the gallows;Mary’s dead in the jail of a fever;I’m left with the memories alone,

the proud sins that I’ll never atonefor, adventures not found in the pagesof your idle romances and novelspoured upon by the leisured and bored

where the heroines find their rewardin making a dazzling marriageto a cultured and virtuous husbandas their dainty and dutiful wives.

Thomas Tyrrell has a PhD in English Literature from Cardiff University. He is a two-time winner of the Terry Hetherington poetry award, and his writing has appeared in Spectral Realms, Wales Arts Review, Picaroon, Lonesome October, Three Drops From A Cauldron and Words for the Wild.

Monday, 10 December 2018

What To Expect

Over there

A black hand just out of reach, behind the curtainOur daughter insisting it’s a monsterYou, insisting it’s a shadow of the jasmineThat creeps lovingly around the doorI’m insisting...who knows? A pitch for ambiguity.Mischief.A love of disquiet.

True, it looks like jasmineBut see how wiry, and suspectIt is, how it moves to and fro(Blown about by The wind, you tut)Unsure of what it is, or where to go.

My daughter curls up in bed Satisfied with your responsePerturbed by mineHer body a knot, casually tied.It’s important to know things at five you, the book,Says. The difference between what is real, what is deadWhat is fake, what’s alive. You can’t go around making things up about Shadows being real.Do you want her to have nightmares? Do you want her to expect the worst?

Of course not, I say. I just want to make a Pitch for ambiguity.The love of disquiet.Mischief.Stories with no ending, no beginning, no Meaning that is taught, only felt,The way a Shakespeare sonnet skirtsThinking to ring deep down in the bonesWhere nothing and everything hurts.

About Liv ChapmanI live in the U.S now but am originally from York, U.K. I earned my PhD in Art History there, and moved to the U.S. to get married. I now have a beautiful daughter, Arrietty, to whom ALL my poems are dedicated! Until recently I was a school administrator (having been an English teacher for some years) but I'm currently on disability due to chronic pain. Despite the pain, I still love warm fall mornings, coffee, reading, and writing, writing, writing.

Monday, 3 December 2018

Black

is the colour of my psyche
of the all-year-round dark mornings
of tears
of Requiem masses - Requiem Aeternam-
Et Lux Perpetua-
of warnings of the abyss ahead
with no bridge
of the folded mourning clothes kept
in the tall dark chest
of the dread of loneliness on Sunday evenings
until one day
the cat with yellow eyes
may cross my path.

Clair started writing poetry at the age of 70 after she retired from the NHS. She lives in Gloucestershire and was inspired by the work of UA Fanthorpe who was Head of English at her secondary school. She is the author of Pilgrimage - a collection of poems written following a visit to Palestine. Her work has been described as ' powerful and moving' by Anna Saunders founder of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

Thursday, 29 November 2018

In the city

There is an eerie wind
blowing glassy-eyed drops of rainover a boy growing out of the pavement, a girl sharing Nietzsche with a pigeon.

There’s nothing unusual about storms in September,but the air is humid, and my neck is sweaty, and it has been Autumn for a while now – the leaves died in June; I also can’t help but feel that the deep and shallow-buried roots of the city are coming up through the concrete,and like something elemental,breaking it apart.

Charlie Hill's poems have previously appeared in Under the Radar, Ink, Sweat and Tears and Prole, amongst other publications.

Monday, 26 November 2018

When I Hold You Red Bursts Through the Eye

Something about holding one another
and all of the years of shepherding the summer born tomatoes.

And maybe the lamb finally coming together with them cooking lovely and steaming, slowly brewing on the stovetop.

All of the blistering days before in the winters tending to the animals. And then the one windy day when they were cudgelled.

Something about holding one another through all the warming of the capillerous reds rising and all of the brutalities befalling like hunks of coal.

Something about the holding and the steeping. Something about time.

Erin Wilson has contributed poems to West Texas Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, New Madrid and Minola Review, with work forthcoming from Split Rock Review, The American Journal of Poetry. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario.

Thursday, 22 November 2018

Riven

She was born with a bad gene.
Penury they call it. Lack. Passed through the blood, indigence hidden in her DNA. The mutation she couldn’t escape.

She belonged to one of those defective family trees, a loser in a fitter family contest. She wasn’t a blue-ribbon baby like a prize calf or grand pumpkin. More like a bumpkin that would devolve the species.

This knack for being poor snuck through the gauntlet of heredity. The state tried hard to keep her mother from breeding. Before they tied her tubes.

So here she is today, torn from an expectant history. She wears ripped jeans, has no means. Her brain may not be bad. She learns a new word

every day. Every day a new word, like riven.

Cathryn Shea is the author of four chapbooks, including “It’s Raining Lullabies” (dancing girl press, 2017). “The Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree” is forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2019. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and recently appears in Tar River Poetry, Gargoyle, Permafrost, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. See www.cathrynshea.com and @cathy_shea on Twitter.

She stares past him to the horizon; the air pulses with hidden static.

“No matter what the future brings…” Under their breath, they hum

distant versions of one song.

S.A. Leavesley (Sarah James) is a poet, fiction writer, journalist, editor and photographer. Overton Poetry Prize winner 2015, she has been published by the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Forward Book of Poetry 2016; on Worcestershire buses and in the Blackpool Illuminations. Recent poetry pamphlets/collections include How to Grow Matches (Against The Grain Press) and plenty-fish (Nine Arches Press) both shortlisted in the International Rubery Book Awards. She also runs V. Press, poetry and flash fiction imprint, and LitWorld2 photo-poem/flash journal. Website: http://www.sarah-james.co.uk/ V. Press: http://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com LitWorld2: http://www.sarah-james.co.uk/?page_id=9835

Lorraine Mariner lives in London and works at The National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre. She has published a pamphlet with The Rialto “Bye for Now” (2005) and two collections with Picador, “Furniture” (2009) and “There Will Be No More Nonsense” (2014). She has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize twice for Best Single Poem and Best First Collection and for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize.

Monday, 12 November 2018

Nope

A person is not a battle. If you are already raging waragainst a lover—they must scorchthe earth to survive whateverterror you want to bringto their home.

II.

Poison isn’t always accompaniedby a pungent smell and warning sign—a picture of how it will eat away flesh and organ.

Sometimes it arrives in prettyglittering bottles with sharp edgesto blind you when you push it away.

Sometimes it’s swift as dust, and shinyas piece of glass in sunlight, it’ll seepinto your chest until you lay in bed one night and find you can’t breathe.

III.Your fighting is flattery,but they have already soughtsafer harbors—havens you don’t even know how to dream of.

Maybe you were never the poison(but let’s not kid ourselves),but you never learned how to be the antidote.

Marisa Silva-Dunbar’s work has been published in Rose Quartz Journal, Awkward Mermaid, Spider Mirror Journal, Mojave He[art] Review, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Poetry WTF?!, Better than Starbucks Magazine, Redheaded Stepchild, Words Dance Magazine and Gargoyle Magazine. She graduated from the University of East Anglia with her MA in poetry, and has been shortlisted twice for the Eyewear Publishing Fortnight Poetry Prize. She has work forthcoming in Mojave He[art] Review, Sixfold, Pussy Magic, Midnight-lane Boutique, and The Same

Thursday, 8 November 2018

That Was The Downstairs

The Toilet, spiteful and ice-boxy,
disapproved of warm seats. It preferred smelly, germicide paper that crinkled and slid off bottoms.

Lounge had crushed-velvet occasions on cocktail sticks, dusty sofas for headstands, radio programmes in real foreign and books for escaping.

Backroom, snug with mottled shins, ponged of coal fire. Toys slept in a cupboard. I stood on a chair, Listened with Mother,ear pressed to a wireless on the bureau.

Kitchen had a twin-tub, a Kenwood Chef with bowls of licky cake-mixan angry housewifemummy who made chicken soup, with garlic.

Bathroom was a bastard, an old geyser, that swore in your face.An adapted scullery that stank of dandruff-shampoo and vinegar.

Front bedroom had a grandma and trolley full of pills. She spoke foreign English and ate olives for breakfast. Each morning the house shook with her sneezes.

Back-bedroom cried when big sister left home.Branches smacked its windows. Little sister, in bed with measles, made plasticine Vikings, kept watch for bogey men behind cupboards.

This poem is from Rachael’s new pamphlet, Girl Golem, published by 4Word.org. Rachael’s parents were toddler migrants from Ukrainian Russia, arriving, with their parents, in 1912 & 1914. Heritage and sense of being other, are her main themes. Rachael is a familiar figure on the poetry circuit. Her collection, Singing at the Bone Tree, is published by Indigo Dreams. Her work appears in anthologies & journals including: Tears in the Fence, Prole, The Rialto, Under the Radar, The Interpreters House, Obsessed with Pipework, Lighthouse. She will be reading at various events over the next few months.

OR

NOR

FOR

SO

BUT

For a moment, one hand will hold the other shut.

AND

What we know is always less than what we don't.

YET

Blue herons synchronize into a silent biplane.

Sara Backer, a composition instructor by day and MFA student by night, has published two chapbooks: Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork), which won the Turtle Island Poetry Award, and Scavenger Hunt (Dancing Girl Press). Her poems have appeared in The Rialto, New Welsh Reader, Crannóg, and more. Her poem "Coal, Crow, Shark" received commendation in the 2018 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. For links to journal publications, please visit sarabacker.com.

Hot-Night Houston

Listen -beneath the hum of planes,the pulse of endless trafficbumping over concrete joins,wails of distant sirens,rumbles of cooling systems,and that rise-and-fall rattle of cicadas -you will hear the city sigh.

Marion Ashton’s background

From home in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, she has spent much of the last fifteen years travelling back and forth to Houston, Texas. The contrast between very different lifestyles plays a big role in her writing as does travelling itself.

She has had poems published in a wide range of magazines, enjoyed several Arvon courses and gained an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway in 2010, with Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott as tutors.

Thursday, 25 October 2018

a couple in water

my skin retained your red and my blue
and at the lull, i could only admire the diluted hues

although i liked learning how to drown
and you are a magnificent cesspool, your love fetters still
the thin fingers that search for something to hold

mama saw me sinking, and whispered that you might just be quicksand
a pitcher for my blood and tears
steady when the world's other oceans danced violently,

but the rippling light tells me your love is illusory
the puddles on the floor at home have no edges, only ends
so i'd like to breathe the dry air one day.

mama, i am leaving him tomorrow.
dry skin is far away,
but i am already free.

Katherine Wu is an avid lover of creative writing, and believes that writing and reading poetry is one of the best ways to discern the world around her. She is an advocate for women in STEM, and enjoys learning about the environmentalist landscape in her local and global community. She is currently a high-school senior, studying in Hong Kong.

Monday, 22 October 2018

transition

maybe that's goodi can say i don't want to go outi want to stay in and learni believe it

but also it's better this wayit's safer this wayfor mefor them tooas they shout and scowl

i want to believeno child is left behindlike i was toldnot as long ago as it seems

the world described to mei want to know more about iti want to help build it

even if it gets dark too earlyif it rains too much

i want to learn

Lu Lin is Chinese, Dawid Juraszek is Polish. She lives in Norwich in the East of England and he in Guangzhou, southern China. In their lives, travels, and writing they try to grapple with the lived experience of being an outsider. Their work has appeared in various outlets in Poland, China, Japan, USA, and UK.